Joseph Mallord William Turner

British landscape painter and printmaker (1775 - 1851)

Turner is regarded as one of the greatest British artists of all time. He helped transform British art and raise landscape painting from ‘superior wallpaper’ to the defining genre of the period.

His long artistic career began at the Royal Academy Schools, London, when he enrolled there in 1789, and ended with his death in 1851. Throughout his life he was preoccupied with travel, light and landscape. He spent almost every summer touring throughout Europe, and the winter transforming his sketches into masterpieces of colour and light.

Turner lived through a period of great change in Britain and Europe; the French Revolution (1789 - 1799) and Napoleonic Wars (1799 - 1815), the ascension of Queen Victoria to the British throne in 1837 and the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The paintings and watercolours in the collection of National Museums Liverpool reflect this history and Turner’s legacy to British art.